Thursday, April 25, 2013

We're home from a visit in Texas with old friends and while I did manage to draw every day I have done little since returning home to good weather and large weeds. Now I'm back to my rather loose attempt to make time every day for art, even if it's something small such as the above collage or smaller greeting card sized pieces or a drawing in my sketchbook. I'm making no excuses. I like working small and finishing fast.

Collage suits me. I've done this sort of work for so long now that it feels like coming home when I sit down to my table and sort through bits of color and pattern, looking for just the right pieces of painted papers to puzzle together.

But I do have a painting that's percolating in my mind. It might be called 10 Days in Texas. Or maybe not. It might turn out to be something un-nameable. When that happens I go through my lists of names and titles, or even consult the dictionary until I find a word that fits.

Some people are so good with titles. One such artist and wordsmith, the printmaker Anne Moore who uses titles like Approaching Stillness, Driving Force, and Interplay. I'd love to get into her head to see how she comes up with such appropriate ones. Does the work come first or does the work follow the title?

How do YOU come up with your good titles? I'm searching for a better way.

Art Tip: Removing acrylic from hands

Use ordinary hand sanitizer to quickly remove acrylic paint and medium from your hands. The alcohol in the sanitizer dissolves the acrylic. Wipe well with a paper towel and then wash with soap and water.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.